searching on the web, apparently the mechanism is to trick the immune system into attacking the drug molecules - having the immune system destroy the moleculues of the "stuff" that gets you high, so you never get high because it never reaches the brain.
I am guessing that th9s "super-virus" that they are talking about might do the same thing - attack the molecules of the chemicals that get you high as if they were harmful bacteria or something.
Interesting. I don't know if I like it. Although there might be some potential good there, somewhere. Wonder how long it takes to wear off...
I am sure that you could convince yourself that it's the right thing to do, but overall, it just sounds like a bad idea.
I am sure that with certain types of logic, such as -- "take this vaccine or go to jail", it would all of a sudden become a very good idea. Then again, another line can also, in certain circumstances, seem to be a good idea.
One should try to not use drugs on one's own first. If it really doesn't work, and you are certain that death is imminent, of course it's a good idea. In other words - "take this vaccine or you will very likely die or spend the rest of your life a hopeless drug addict" is very good logic. If it works, that's wonderful. But if it only removes the effect (i.e. the "relief"), then an existing addict might spend the rest of their life never being able to fulfill the craving? That might cause people to commit suicide or something - if that's what it does.
I just don't see how anyone can predict with complete certainty that a particular child is going to have a drug problem.
These types of things should only be given to people who have serious drug problems as a last resort. If the vaccine needs to be given prior to an individual having developed a drug problem, then there are going to be ethical, legal, moral, and "class" issues about it.
Generally speaking, FreeBSD is good, and Linux is also good. I think that they are both good, if you know how to configure them.
Linux is excellent when it comes to hardware that is not i386. That is one of Linux's greatest strengths. Also NetBSD's, but there are things about Linux and expensive cutting-edge hardware that are undeniably wonderful.
FreeBSD is best on the i386, perhaps the Alpha as well. I have not tried FreeBSD on Alpha, but FreeBSD on i386 is great. So are some Linux distributions on i386.
One thing that I like about FreeBSD is this: now that everyone has broadband, (well, not everyone) - but when it comes to installing an OS on your computer, broadband sure does help.
So I stopped downloading the ISOs and basically all you need for Debian, and FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo as well, I am sure that there are more like this - but I have tried all of those - you download and burn a small install CD-R - something like 50-100 megs or so, and then the installer downloads whatever else you want. That way an entire install with most of what you need to get up and running in terms of software is about 300-600 megs, or so, depending on what you want to install right off the bat.
A situation I ran into with Debian was this - come back later, say like a month later, and try to install an application that has dependencies (in my case it was K3B without having KDE on the machine) - and it doesn't work. Libraries and dependencies have been upgraded and are newer than what you have on your machine the older ones that would be appropriate for your install aren't available anymore - so you need to upgrade the system first. If you had a snapshot (i.e. if you had downloaded 3 or 4 isos and installed from that) you would be OK, you would just be getting slightly older everything by installing from the CDs you downloaded a month ago. But having done the net install, I had to upgrade the entire OS, which is probably not a bad idea, and is pretty easy to do anyway, but still... all I wanted to do was install one program and I have to upgrade the entire OS to be in sync with everything on the debian software archives. Not a big deal, but it kind of makes you think that sometimes it would be nice to have a snapshot.
This is the cool thing about the FreeBSD ports system. The ports system looks in various places for the source code of things - not a central binary archive that you set with Debian, for instance - and if you ever look at source code ftp servers and so on, you can find previous versions for perhaps even years later after newer versions have come out. So with the ports system, you essentially have a snapshot, and even though it may take longer, and the ports system might search many different places and experience timeouts when it tries to find source code for stuff a year after you originally installed it, chances are that it still might work. Certainly, you can upgrade the ports system via cvs anytime, and it's a good idea to do so, as well as upgrade your base system (which is, admittedly, a bit scary) but the nice thing is that you don't have to upgrade the ports every few weeks if you don't want to. So with FreeBSD you get to do a netinstall, save bandwidth and CD-Rs, yet still have what essentially amounts to a snapshot in time of additional software. There are also occasional advantages to building software from source in terms of legal issues, which all results in having more software available than you would when someone else has to take the source and repackage it up for you and redistribute it in binary form.
The other nice thing with FreeBSD is that it has a repository of binaries, which it hits up when you first do your install, to help speed things up. You can recompile everything from source later once you get your system up and running if you really want to. Get it running first.
I suppose you could do many of these things with Gentoo as well, in a similar fashion. One thing that Gentoo still needs is a good selection of binaries - I am sure t
And I thought that Windows was supposed to be user friendly.
While you may have to configure Linux, and while the configuration details might have a learning curve, they are by no means anything even resembling uncharted territory - what you need to do to configure Linux is actually documented fairly well, if you know where to look.
But this kind of registry editing and the thing with the renaming of the file and running some batch job -- this is uncharted territory. It's not something that you didn't know before, and had to learn. It's not something that was always there (e.g./etc/motd) but you didn't realize it was there. This is uncharted territory, and it's just plain bad engineering.
Linux is easier, it seems, than this. Perhaps the real answer is that getting Linux "just right" involves some experimentation, and that there is an ever-present learning curve with Linux. Aside from that, it's consistent. It always boils down to some file that you didn't know about or some place where you can set some setting that you had to learn about.
The desciption in this article is just downright scary. I'm sticking with Linux, thanks. Actually, I should say GNU/Linux or other modern Unix-like OS's such as the BSDs - if I am going to be precise about it. There is a learning curve, yes... but once you are over that part of it, which does take a while, it's a very comfortable place to be.
There has been talk about giving greater support to music and arts, at all levels of education, grade school on up. Creativity is important.
I have this disturbing vision though, sometimes, of what music class might boil down to - the concept of being famous, of being cool, of finding inspiration in pop music. Creativity equating to pushover, student-pleasing teachers that allow their music students to act out their fantasies of fame and popularity in class, in front of other students, in the name of music education and appreciation. A poor substitute for what could be important groundwork for a strong creative arts curriculum.
Ok, maybe that's my personal nightmare, and actually, I hope that I am wrong. But when I see something like this, it reaffirms my dilemna.
Supporting music and the arts in the classroom, at all levels of education, grade school on up, does not necessarily have to equate to "cool", or "popular", or whatever.
I don't think that this is a good thing, handing out all those Ipods, because there are many ways to do things, and everybody learns differently. Quality education, like open source software, is (should be) about customizing the educational environment so that you can learn in the most efficient way possible, which is ultimately different for each student.
I suppose if you are paying out this much money for tuition an Ipod might as well be as irrelevant as a welcoming brochure, so it's probably not really that big of a deal.
It would be better, however, to simply hand out the iPods and not try to conjure up some kind of excuse and to not try and find some productive use for them. That's the kind of stuff that got Martha thrown in jail, if you think about it.
All this really goes to show is how respect for multimedia, creativity, and the arts, has been slipping in our educational systems, because as we can see here in this case, the creative arts are being used as an excuse to give everyone iPods, just like they are used as an excuse by students who wish to entertain their secret fantasies of fame and fortune.
It's (should be) about the creativity, it's (should be) about the expression, the wit, the depth of expression that we can experience when we watch a good movie, or listen to a good piece of music.
A light bulb went off in someone's head, and they figured out how useful this contraption could be in furthering what that individual percieves as "underwater basket weaving" - unimportant, easy to manipulate, "won't pay the mortgage" creative arts. It would be interesting if there were any comparsion studies done between different approaches. Let's compare the purchase of these iPods to the purchase of textbooks, or the selection of teaching staff - and then we will see.
We need more respect for the creative arts, from the grade-school level on up.
The only reason anyone would want to take action on a patent in such a manner would be in order to draw attention to themselves (e.g. a patent pool peddling patents). There is nothing MS can gain by doing this, and they aren't going to shut anything or anyone down. It is more than likely to backfire on them.
It's a cold war, and rogue nations would threaten to use the weapons (i.e. file a lawsuit to grab attention) - MS is a superpower, they are not going to push that button.
It just won't happen. MS is too worried about patents itself. They are only meaningful if you don't use them. Once you use them you lose any advantage that you may have had.
They have it in red China. Songs that are sung to praise the leaders and songs that sing about how great everything is.
Someone like W gets elected and then we have all of these right-wing authors and talk-show hosts that all of a sudden become relevant - they weren't relevant before, and won't be relevant if/when someone like Kerry gets elected.
The music industry should try to seperate itself from the government; the reason it should try to do this is because the music industry should remain in a place where it can enable artists to be critical of the government; where it can enable artists to be critical of unjust wars and other things.
When the music or entertainment industry goes to the government to seek help, they are hurting their future ability to remain independent of that government, they are hurting the ability of artists that they support in the future to be critical of the government, and to remain independent of the dark, inaccurate corners of that government's policies.
Any government will make mistakes, and constituent "bases" will take delight in things that need to be changed. Here is one area that artists can provide an alternate opinion, a different view - one can only infer from its actions that the music industry has no intention of trying to support and encourage diverse thought and opinion.
So they will keep churning out pickup truck and cowboy gear advertisements and SUV aftermarket parts advertisements and reality videos of karaoke, with perhaps the occasional college band-member's reality heartbreaking girlfriend-boyfriend relationship reality video mixed in here and there.
I think that a more likely scenario is that no one is really going to want to download anything the mainstream music media has to offer if they keep going at it the way they are going at it.
Popular music and conservative government should not mix, it does not lead to good things. If the music industry wants its fans to take care of it, and respect it, if it wants to attract talented artists who think outside the box, and aren't afraid to voice their political opinions, it should not go running to the government like it is doing.
There is the quote from an AC/DC song - "living on the streets, you gotta practice what you preach" - so that is, if the mainstream music industry wants to support and encourage artists that present an unbiased opinion, perhaps artists that present opinions that aren't as favorable to government and the status quo, they can't go running to the goverment for help like that. It won't work. No one is going to take the maistream music industry seriously.
Maybe all those dowloaders are just bored, and/or have nothing better to download. Destroying their ability to download anything other than music industry stuff via criminalizing competing technical gadgets isn't going to make them any less bored, or give them anything more interesting or more download-friendly (in a legal sense) to download.
FreeBSD (I am using 4.10) has a Gentoo "stage 1" port, actually.
There is a directory called/usr/compat/linux, under which you have all the usual/usr (that would be/usr/compat/linux/usr/, if you know what I mean) and/bin and/lib, and so on...
so you... "chroot" into/usr/compat/linux and then you can "make system" or whatevever. It's not bad.
The default is a Red Hat - I have what is essentially a basic Red Hat 9.0 system on my FreeBSD machine, there is also a port for Debian Stable.
So you can do vmware for Linux, or you can do vmware for FreeBSD, just like you can do Mozilla for Linux, or any other app for Linux. I imagine you could install portage under/usr/compat/linux/usr/portage by chrooting into/usr/compat/linux and emerging sync, and then emerge whatever you want - as long as you are chrooted, it should work (I haven't tried it). So everything you emerge should be done while you are chrooted into/usr/compat/linux - if I understand this correctly -- however, the Gentoo port, the Gentoo FreeBSD port, under/usr/ports/emulators/, would be installed like any other FreeBSD port - and actually, there are many FreeBSD "Linux" ports that can be installed automatically from the FreeBSD ports system, no chrooting or anything required. The chrooting would be if you wanted to leave FreeBSD behind and enter into Linux land - apparently this works, but I haven't tried it. Everything I have needed to install that is a Linux binary has been available as a FreeBSD port.
Another cool thing is that you can apparently upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 and above to Dragonfly BSD, which is something I will probably be doing at some point in the future.
I have this somewhat funky, older computer - it's a somewhat (1.5 Ghz) speedy Athlon, but the thing is it has this somewhat older Seagate 10K RPM SCSI hard drive in it. I kind of pieced this computer together from parts here, and parts there.
So of course, I had to install Gentoo on it. I did. It took a while. I burned out a stick of RAM. I am afraid of Gentoo. But anyway, I got it up and running, but I had to disable tagged queueing on the disk to keep it from freezing up all the time. So here I am, with a functional Gentoo machine, and this 10,000 RPM disk is very, very loud. You can hear it in the next room when it does an updatedb or anything like that. With the ext3 filesystem, I do believe that it was doing what you call "thrashing". Just really loud, scary type of many tiny ball bearings in a coffee can type noise. Well, I had had enough, and Gentoo really creeped me out. I didn't like the idea of a journaling filesystem that fscks every now and then and you never know what the fsck is going to find. The first fsck it did (after some 20+ reboots over the course of a month or two) required a reboot because of some inconsistency it found. Just not cool at all - maybe I am paranoid, but I would rather have the thing fsck right away - and I know you can set it that way, or set it not to fsck at all, but in any case - the real drag was how loud the disk was, and that it appeared to be thrashing when certain things were going on - make installs, file extracts, updatedbs. I didn't like it. It creeped me out.
So I installed FreeBSD 4.10. I love FreeBSD. And you know something, the disk is really, really quiet now. I went back and re-enabled tagged queueing. No problems. Same disk, same controller, different OS. The disk sort of sounds like a welder now (like you are welding something). It's not loud, it doesn't thrash, and the power got cut once, but it fsck'd right away and you know you're good to go immediately, not waiting for the next 28th reboot to find out there is something horribly wrong with your filesystem.
So it's really amazing to me, how much quieter the disk is with FreeBSD. I know it's a loud disk, it's kind of a funky computer. It even has a funky heatsink. But the difference is like night and day.
So in this case, switching from ext3 to ufs solved a problem that I had. The disk I/O is actually a tad slower with ufs, it appears, according to bonnie++, which I did on both OS's... but the disk is so much quieter that I can hardly believe it. I would have never imagined it.
So sometimes, it may not be so much that you know what is wrong, or where the problem is coming from, but it's your ability to do something about it. In my case, I chose ufs, because I didn't want the disk to thrash, even though I was getting just slightly over 1MB/s greater disk I/O with ext3. This is not something you can just do overnight, it required a complete OS reinstall.
Right now, though, it is just a really wonderful computer to use - my last uptime was 10 days, 10 hours, and 10 minutes and 39 seconds. (storm was coming in and I don't have a UPS). Wonderful, stable, smooth-running, and _somewhat_ quiet system.
But seriously, I still haven't figured out what it is about Gentoo that creeps me out. I wonder if Dtrace could help me out with that one.
Dtrace does sound cool though, I think it can be very useful, provided that you can make the changes that you need to make without reinventing the wheel, or refactoring your entire program. Maybe there would be some way that Sun could sell it to people, or port it to other OS's and let people buy binary versions of it for a nominal fee?
The only problem I had that was really unexpected and devastating was when I touched the thermal tape to the CPU core more than once. In other words, thermal tape is only good on the first application. If you move it around, take it on and off, trying to double-check your work, to see if the heatsink is on there properly, you kill the thermal tape. You have once chance with the thermal tape to put that on properly, and if you remove the heatsink after the tape has touched the CPU, it's no good anymore.
Anyway, at the time the Duron 750 was like a $30.00 part, and memory was incredibly cheap and getting cheaper, so a new stick of RAM and a new Duron 750, a Thermaltake vacuum cleaner and some thermal grease, and everything was back to normal.
It's been since upgraded to an XP 1700+, so that's pretty nice. Still works well, solid, reliable, weeks-of-uptime BSD machine.
OK - what does this have to do with anything? I'll tell you... it's an interesting story. A friend of mine knows Michael Moore personally, so I have always kind of been very supportive of his efforts with Bowling, and Roger and Me, etc... I was excited when the trailer came out, watched it, etc...
Then Ken Brown with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute came out with the "samizdat" stuff about Linux being stolen from Minix or some nonsense, and I was reading all about that, and I was, of course, stunned by the "FUD", and was reading every article that came out about it.
So there I was, reading an article rebutting Ken Brown and his anti-Linux propoganda, written by a very knowlegable individual, and it was a good article (I don't remember which article it is now or I'd link to it) - it went through the issues point by point, and it was, I thought, a well-written article that "stuck up" for Linux, and open source. But here's the thing, the point, the phrase that changed my life as I know it... the author said that what Ken Brown had done would make individuals like Micheal Moore "blush", or something along those lines. Some other individuals were mentioned, I believe Limbaugh was another one. In other words, Ken Brown has "outdone" Moore, and Moore could "learn" from Brown. It didn't even click, or sink in, for a second or two.
But then I did some searching on the net, and you know what, my friend actually threatened to never speak with me again if I didn't shut up about it. But despite all that, my opinion is that Moore is just a little "screwy". My opinion, mind you. Not a fact, not other people's opinion.
Freedom of speech - OK, freedom of speech is a good thing - let's "bring" freedom of speech "to the world". But bringing "democracy" to the world, that's got to be a big sin, right? How could those war-mongers even suggest that other countries want democracy, right? But showing the film in Syria, in Lebanon, right on, babe. Those countries "need" freedom of speech. They "need" our American values and Mr. Moore is going to bring it to them! Rock on.
OK - it's all fun and powerful UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU. Like it did with Linux and Ken Brown, or SCO. When SCO happens to YOU, when AdTI happens to YOU, when Michael Moore happens to YOU - you will feel differently about it. Of course, it is freedom of speech, after all, which is EXACTLY what SCO is... freedom of speech, and why Germany could tell them to put a sock in it and the US can't - freedom of speech. And freedom of speech means that you may hear things that you don't like - but that's OK - my freedom of speech says that Moore has a deep-seated hatred towards America, and a lack of respect for Americans as human beings. Again, my opinion, my freedom of speech. Not facts, etc.. There is a difference between "touching up" a picture in Photoshop to make it look better and fake celebrity porn. There is a line, where editing, chopping and piecing things together becomes something else (like fake celebrity porn). But hey... freedom of speech, right? No problem with that.
I really hate to be unpopular, especially since my friend knows Moore personally, but I have some questions that I wouldn't mind asking the gentleman. Granted, much of what is presented in Farenheit IS factually acurrate, not to mention that there ARE many issues with the Bush administration. It's just that there is a deeper sense of integrity and affect that I am looking for, that I am not finding. It's not balanced, and it's anti-American. Hatred is a bad thing, especially if you hate your own country. That's different from being angry at the current administration's policies and actions. Two different things. If you hate America, and you are an American, they you hate yourself. None of us really had any choice in where we were born, so I think we need to look at citizenship and patriotism in a completely different way than we are tending to.
I guess that the thing that bugs me, when it boils down to it, and take this how you will, is that Moore i
I think that it's perfectly reasonable to collect flac versions of stuff. A 20 Gig hard drive, for instance will give you approximately 75 hours of music, if you use flac. Make a copy of the flac files to a DVD-R, and import them as necessary into your ipod. It's not that bad.
With 128, you are almost literally carrying what would have been an individual's entire record collection around with you on a small device, so yes, that is a huge jump in terms of how much stuff you are carrying around with you - so with flac, you can carry 40-50 "CDs" with you (on a 20 gig drive, that is) - that's a lot, isn't it? It's better than almost any other way of hauling 50 compact disks with you in some kind of zippered thing, isn't it?
I think flac is way more realistic (if you have broadband, that is). If you don't have broadband, forget it. It should, at least, be an option, I think.
There is a difference in sound quality, no doubt about it. And with flac, for instance, you are chopping the size of the files in half, so with lots of "legacy" stuff - in other words.. stuff that is originally from vinyl, where a "CD" may only be 40-45 mins, you can usually fit three CD's in flac format onto a 700mb data CD-R.
Collecting low bit-rate stuff is kind of a last resort, for instance, if there were no other way to get a particular album, and you really wanted that album, settling for a 128 version would be OK most of the time. But if the CD is available for purchase, and you are paying $10 for a 128 bitrate version, the extra few bucks for the CD are more or less worth it.
The first logical step is to eliminate the zombies. There has got to be some way to do this, but here is what it requires: a more secure OS. So, it's probably not going to happen.
The second logical step is to trace back where the spam is originating from and at least try to, in some way, utilizing due process, hold people accountable for it. Of course there is no point in doing this until we have more secure OS's that won't act like zombies.
So, first, eliminate the zombies, then, once that is done (probably never), hold people accountable, or notify them, or send out warning that they will get blackholed or something - because if you get rid of the zombies, then anyone sending spam will be easier to track down, even if it is a webhost or something like that.
The portability issue comes up a lot of times when it comes to using "undocumented", or "implementation specific" features of programming languages.
If you stick to the programming languages as they are defined in various official industry standards (e.g. ISO) - then you may lose some functionality, undocumented functionality, functionality that may only work for one particular platform. More than likely, you are going to have to play around with it to see what it actually does when you write code this way - it will do one thing on Windows, another thing on Macs, and so forth. That's why you shouldn't use it.
Portability involves two things - 1) writing good code (this requires that you know how to write good code) and 2) sticking to the standard and not using undocumented features. Of course, these are both related, because if you stick to the standard and only use documented features, then you have taken a large step towards writing good code.
"portability is for canoes" = "laziness, poor programming habits, poor programming skills, and hack jobs to meet MY deadlines, are perfectly acceptable. Actually, anything that makes me look like a good manager is perfectly acceptable! ".
This kind of stuff simply won't work very well in a competitive marketplace.
We really need to define "great software", and when you think about it, that's difficult to do, especially since software is a moving target.
"Shipping" does not involve cvs access, and probably doesn't involve source code access either.
"On time" doesn't really make sense, unless, of course you have been making promises, or have been given deadlines.
1. Study the successes that you see, study those individuals or organizations that have accomplished things similar to which you wish to accomplish, and then apply what you have learned. It's a very good key to success. If were were to learn something from this, we would need to look further than just one company, further than just one manager.
2. Software is a moving target. Some software moves faster than others, and the whole idea of a "snapshot" goes against the grain of a moving target (it's just easier to deal with sometimes.) Software, really, should be an on-going development process, and while it's possible that you might have to slow down the speed of the "moving target" in order to take a snapshot, or make a "release", taking snapshots and releases shouldn't occur to the detriment of the ongoing development process in general, and the current state of development should be somewhat ahead of the snapshot or release. Great software is more like a living organism, less like an inanimate object. The release, or the snapshot, or the "shipping", has traditionally been the main focus, but what really counts, I think, is that the development process be ongoing, and progressing at a sufficiently consistent and rapid rate. Shipping something is just something that happens as part of the development process, a side effect, if you will; the development process is the main focus, the main goal.
I can understand where the individual is coming from, but this is really more like a how-to on how to keep your job as a manager in an organization such as Microsoft - these rules may not work universally in all business settings, in all software development settings, and may, in fact, be detrimental.
What is really needed is more input - more input from employees, from managers, from the managers' managers - from a diverse selection of software development organizations across the globe - then there needs to be an agreement on what is "great software" - obviously, we are currently moving out of a phase where the relatively new world of software and computers has been dominated by one software vendor - it's hard to define "great software" if you don't have a competitive and free marketplace. It's like trying to define "great leader" in a dictatorship. It just doesn't work.
There's no proof - there is insufficient evidence that this will actually work today, and tomorrow, as the world moves towards a more competitive marketplace in the software industry. I certainly doubt that this is going to be very good for turnover rates, and most importantly, will this type of development methodology be successful in ATTRACTING and RETAINING the MOST talented software designers that are out there? I think the answer to that question is obvious.
I probably agree with most of what he says there, except for that
1) good code isn't propoganda 2) destroying Microsoft shouldn't be a goal 3) beggars can't be choosers - (I won't beg people to use Linux)
not to mention...
Using patents as anything other than a form of insurance or a form of fake currency is entirely unproductive and will only serve to reduce their value as a fake currency and as a modern-day form of insurance. Unless, of course, people would choose to use them for what they are meant to be used for...
The DMCA is going to be rewritten
Someone is going to take what this Halloween document says and twist it and try to prove that Linux is out to destroy proprietary software and your paycheck, which will generate more arguments back and forth.
Just because Red Hat might be right doesn't mean that they are the best choice in software for your organization.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
Microsoft is a company. What is a company but a collection of individuals. The problem is not Microsoft, the problem is individuals who work, used to work, know people who work, etc... at Microsoft. The same thing can be said for government. It's not Microsoft + the government out to destroy Linux, it's individuals + individuals being selfish, greedy and stupid.
The first thing that can be done is to show respect for Microsoft. Sure, Linux costs more, but IT'S BETTER. (which is true). Linux is more expensive because it's better. (it's actually less expensive). Now all the rich folks will want Linux because it's the "Cadillac" of operating systems. Microsoft gets Chevrolet status by their own request.
I recently though of an analogy after reading Stephen Hawking's book - it's about entropy, or the direction of time. Glasses fall off of tables and shatter, they don't pick themselves up from pieces on the floor and magically un-break themselves and fall "up" back on the table in one piece.
But God, or in this case, let's compare God to the public - to the individual who is observing what is going on, and making a decision, a judgement, as to which software solution is the best to buy.
Can God, or the observer, in this case, press "rewind", and have the glass re-assemble itself? If this is true, does it really matter who threw the first punch? For all anyone cares, they are just "fighting". It doesn't matter who started it.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
It's not why it's being done. Apparently some individuals feel that by generating this type of to-do, that some greater purpose is being served. This has everything to do with greedy, misguided individuals within large (or not so large) organizations who have somehow decided that they can obtain great wealth by looking in dark corners of closets or attics, etc. That's what I think.
The whole thing is being "reverse-engineered". The "desired outcome" is a lawsuit, so whatever it takes to produce one is what takes place. Normally, the lawsuit is the means by which another desired outcome is produced. In this case, the "desired outcome" is/are the lawsuit(s), because this is about individuals within organizations obtaining promotions or "finding valuables in attics", or something like that.
This is what happens sometimes within large (or perhaps, sometimes, not so large) organizations - a few individuals wielding great power, looking to improve their status in the world, stab and fumble and grope in the dark, searching for their own private monetary nirvana, unable to settle for a salary and job security that "ain't broke".
This is not good for Microsoft the company; it's not good for Microsoft the company's reputation; perhaps sometime soon someone representing Microsoft the company will step forward and proclaim this whole thing an unhelpful distraction, which is exactly what it is.
I think every one of us has worked with an individual or two who had their own selfish interests placed ahead of their coworkers and the company itself. How much more tempting might it be, working amongst (or for) one of the wealthiest individuals in the US, if not the world? Let's face it... Microsoft is a legend, and Microsoft will always be a legend. Microsoft can have a bright future, Microsoft should have a bright future. It's as plain and simple as that. What is really needed here is another Lee Iacocca, another Jack Welch, etc... people like this are out there, and they do exist. But money talks, and being around it changes you - it takes a very, very strong individual to be able to turn down the prospect of an early retirement to do the right thing. What, with the patents and all, who wouldn't want to just go to some tropical island and never have to worry about this nonsense again? Perhaps one day when someone who truly has a passion for quality products, whether they be hardware or software, when someone who has true leadership abilities, and can inspire people to produce tip-top products - I believe there will be such a day, and I believe there will be such a person, but a little patience will be required - but when this day comes, I think that we should all try to get out there and welcome Microsoft back into the real world. It would be a good thing, sort of like a long-lost friend or something. The changes that will be necessary will happen, and the negativity and FUD will stop, it's just going to take the right person to bring this about.
I guess it really depends on what you call a Unix timeline, and what you call SCO intellectual property. Of course it wasn't their intellectual property at the time, but it is now since they changed the contracts on everyone. IBM didn't think that they could change the contracts, and see what happened.
They sued Daimler Chrysler for not giving them the serial numbers of processors that used to run UNICOS 1.0 or something similar (UNICOS 1.0 apparently always shipped with source)- for Cray supercomputers that vary in processing power from approximately 0.25 gigaflops to 1 gigaflop. No one keeps museum pieces that old around, there is no point in doing so, especially when the point of having those computers in the first place was for their supercomputing abilities.
It's not a Unix timeline if they use it like that; they are basically saying that "Linux" has its "roots" in stuff prior to 1991, but that "SCO Linux", whatever that is supposed to mean, is anything from 1991 forward.
The whole point is this: whatever it is that SCO are doing, they are doing things that will more than likely fail. Expecting an organization to keep records of a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the mid-eighties that has approximately 1/60th the floating-point processing power of a single-processor G5 at 2.0 Ghz and the equivalent of 64 megs of ram is a little bit on the funny side, I seriously doubt that any organization would have the floor space to keep a computer like that around just for the sake of licensing purposes. How many of us wrote legal documents to Microsoft cancelling our EULAs when we stopped using Windows 3.0, or say, for instance, how many universities wrote documents to Sun Microsystems every time they retired an IPX or a Sparcstation 1+ or perhaps something even older than that? It's just so you can say "We are suing this prominent company for something that, when you look more closely at it, is never going to fly, but we realize that most people won't look at it that closely or understand it that thoroughly, so it will, in the end, have the desired effect.
Anything prior to approximately 1991 is not Linux, so again, it's not relevant.
It does explain what \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}, is though, - \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\} would be Linux (post-1991).
Anything prior to that is not Linux, so it's not \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}.
SCO is basically saying that because they distributed Linux at some point under the GPL, and because the GPL is not valid in their opinion, that because they contributed to it, and because they hold some sort of UNIX rights, that they own Linux. That's really what they are saying, it has nothing to do with Minix, that's just a coincidence.
Of course, they won't get away with it. They know that, the lawyers know that, we know that. The real question is WHY are they doing it? That's the question. The answer to that question is known by those who need to know.
Some certifications are a way to learn how to use a particular company's hardware or software; there is usefulness in that.
Are you really learning anything, that is the question.
I have to disagree with the author; my personality and his certainly wouldn't match up and I would have a hard time working with an individual like that.
It's not so much that "certifications" are useless, as a whole, it's that some certifications are next to useless, or are just incredibly easy to get. And on top of that, the "goal" gets twisted, and the idea becomes "passing the exam", instead of looking deeper into actually learning the material that the exam is supposed to test you on. "Cracking" the test, so to speak is what is creating this problem.
Then again, there is no universal law that states that if you are a highly talented HR person that you will also be a highly talented writer of articles, is there? Any talented, careful, professional HR person with an attention to detail can weed out those individuals who have used the certification as leverage to try to obtain a position that they are not qualified for.
If you know your stuff, the certification is not necessarily a hoop to jump through, it's more like a bookshelf on which to put your books, or something like that. If you have to study for it, you should study for it, and you should learn what you need to know. If you really know what you need to know to pass the certification, and the certification is a difficult and professionaly prepared certification, then it should more or less be somewhat of a piece of cake to take the exam.
Any half-way competent HR person can weed their way through these types of things and make sufficiently accurate decisions regarding personnel. Whether or not that HR person can write a good article, or whether an individual who can write a good article is also a qualified HR person is implementation-specific.
I installed a Linux OS on a new computer that I put together, and I was excited that SGI's XFS was available on Linux. I had been using UFS with Softupdates on a FreeBSD machine, and having gone through various power outages and a minor tornado-like event with no problems, I wanted to have some sort of similar thing on the new Linux machine, and I wasn't necessarily convinced that ext2 was up to the task (compared to UFS with Softupdates).
But when I heard that xfs was available on Linux, I jumped at the chance, and am still using that machine today. I like XFS, but you have to be careful, because you will tend to lose data when the power cuts out. Whatever files you were last working on, whatever apps were open, that is what is most vulnerable. You might very well end up with an empty file, and that's not a whole lot of fun. I guess that I was just misinformed, or was reading stuff that had misinformed me about the data loss situation. Perhaps ext3 would have been better, but I really wanted to be "cool", as well, so I had to do xfs, of course.
So I later realized that the purpose of xfs (and journaling filesystems in general) was not so much to protect from filesystem corruption and data loss, but to be able to get your filesystem back up and running easier without having to do extensive fsck procedures when you fire your machine back up. So that's a lesson learned - I still like xfs, and I love the speed with which it performs, even if there are risks when things aren't backed up. For now, I will continue using it, but it's probably not EXACTLY what I was looking for as a replacement for ufs with softupdates.
But anyway, back to RAID. There are advantages to RAID - if you have a mirrored hard drive, you don't need to go hunt down your backup, you just switch over to the other drive. You don't constantly need to take backups (every 5 minutes, I mean) to have that mirrored drive be current. You can also get the speed.
What I am wondering is this: Isn't using RAID as a way to mitigate simple hard drive failure in a residential setting something that the concept of RAID perhaps wasn't exactly designed for? Journaling filesystems, for instance - the idea is to recover QUICKLY, not just recover. It seems to me that RAID is, similarly, designed so that you can recover QUICKLY - from a hard drive failure, not just recover, and that's just a hard drive failure - there could be other failures as well, right?
So while RAID is better than nothing to help you recover from a failure of a hard drive specifically, a better insurance policy would be to have a tape drive of some sort and to use that to do backups and incremental backups. It would seem to me that striping might be a hell of a lot more fun anyway.
So I think that until we really look at the purposes that RAID can effectively be used for in a bulletproof sense, we might not understand why RAID might be an imperfect solution to the problem of surving a simple hard drive failure in a residential setting, where uptime is not as critical as it might be in a more non-residential type facility.
I think two computers is a good idea. Keep one unplugged (from everything) when you are not using it, and keep your personal files synced up as best you can (or backed up with CD-Rs, DVD-Rs). Then you can have fun with striped RAID setups if you want and not worry. In the long run, setting yourself up so that you can do the risky stuff is probably not only going to give you the confidence to have fun, but might also serve as a safety net that you didn't even know you had if that ever becomes necessary.
I will give you that much, I understand. Here is the thing - some folks will sell other folks access to these signals for a fee. For a much smaller fee, actually, than DirectTV charges to do it legitimately. So at that point, when you have groups or individuals who are setting up hardware that will allow access to the premium channels, and selling it for a profit for themselves, and these groups and individuals have nothing to do with DirectTV, then you might have a problem.
It's like people selling cable boxes for cheap, so that they can make a profit, giving other folks access to premium cable channels that the cable co. would charge them a lot more for.
So in that sense, the "pirates", in these types of situations, they have no overhead, and they are making money off of those signals. On the other hand, if they are already radiating through your brain, that's a different situation altogether.
I don't know where people get this concept that the only reason to go to college is to prove to an employer that you are willing to do things that are meaningless and pointless - I have heard this before, usually coming from people who aren't all that particularly successful or satisfied in life.
It's simply not true - perhaps that's the difference between an Ivy league education an one gotten at the local community college.
There are so many things to learn in college, and college does, in fact, have a purpose, although feeling like you need to go to one just so that you don't have to work a horrible job sort of tends to obscure that purpose. I suppose there are many people that graduate with a BS without even having fully grown up yet, still in the daze of youth, so in that case, I suppose you are just lucky.
My point is that we don't respect college enough in our society. We tend to do that with lots of things. Our leaders do the same things with the White House and Congress. A car is no longer a way to get around, it's a fashion statement. A lawsuit is no longer a way to redress injustice, it's a means to force someone to pay up (RIAA).
Ok, lawsuits aren't as important as education, but that's the point - college is so much more than just a way to not be poor; it is so much more than a way to get a job. If you miss that, then you are missing the whole point of what college is all about.
I believe that education, when tapped into properly, can make a huge difference in an individual's life, and by extension, that individual can take what he or she has learned and help change other people's lives. It has nothing to do with money, it has to do with freeing your mind. Free your mind, and your torso will follow. It's true.
So the important thing is to really "get in to" what college is all about, and to not use it as a weapon against other people who are not so fortunate as yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working a menial job; and perhaps if you think there is, maybe one day you will be the one working it. If your self respect comes from the job you hold, then you have no self respect. If you live your life in fear, you haven't obviously tapped into the power of education, and everything education can do for you.
It's FUD - basic, simple, straighforward FUD. I would never suggest to anyone that they go to college simply for the purpose of getting a better job, or to prove to their employer that they can do things that they don't like. It's not BS, actually - it's just crappy teachers and bored students, if it's anything.
I would say that English, actually, English is probably simultaneously one of the most dreaded required courses (freshman comp) and one of the most important pathways to success. If you have good English skills, you are on your way to wherever you want to go. It's really unfortunate, because "english" gets a "bad rap", and it gets totally misunderstood. So that's the biggest challenge, I think, these days - to really get into and appreciate English, the study of language. I think the peer pressure, the college experience tends to do a disservice to the respect of English, and the improvements you can bring to your life by being able to put down your thoughts. I cannot stress this enough.
To say that the primary purpose of college is to prove to your employer that you can sit through a bunch of BS is completely off the mark, because 1) it's not BS and 2) it won't get you a very good job, and 3) if you think it's BS that's because you weren't paying attention.
I think this type of attitude is one of the biggest problems our society faces these days - our computer software crashes 5 times a day but we use it anyway, and pay thousands of dollars to do so - college is all BS, but we go anyway, and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debts to do so.
See, my dear friend, THIS is the difference - THIS is the difference between your ilk and the Ivy League, my dear, dear friend. THIS is what you DON'T get when you hire an Ivy League graduate.
You can't drive an F1 car on the street. Or perhaps a four-leaf clover. Or something like that.
The important part, actually, is realizing, or finding ways to make things that are unpleasant tolerable - to approach things objectively - like criticism, for instance, like politics, demonstrations, being chewed out by someone who doesn't like you and perhaps feels threatened by you.
It's the ability to tune out those unpleasant "vibes", if you will - you could call it adapting, perhaps - tune them out and regather yourself.
See the thing is, some people are capable, at least in their own words, of doing something that they really hate. I say that you don't have to hate it; you just have to learn how to tune out the negative emotions and the unhealthy feelings. As a matter of fact, if you hate it, such as many of these apparently successful individuals point out, something inside of you won't even allow you to continue; your subconcious will be at war with your rational mind and you will never quite understand the complex failures that you will experience.
To be perfectly honest, I doubt that any individual that talks about "hell" and "stuff you have to do" hasn't had a boyfriend or girlfriend or some other "goal" or "dream" that has helped them "get through" this crap.
Let's face it - there are so many people whom science isn't capable of understanding! And you may not be one of them, but sometimes this stuff is visible, but we just don't understand it.
The talent, the gift, the solution, the answer is this - learn how to tune out anything that doesn't feel or is known as not being good - I mean things like laziness, depression, FUD, inappropriate criticism, and learn how to enjoy just sitting at a desk doing a repetitive task. Some very successful individuals may feel that you may get further in life by running electric shocks through your body, or perhaps hitting yourself over the head with a sledgehammer while sitting at a desk doing repetitive tasks, but nothing could be futher from the truth. The key is learning how to tune out the emotions and fears (and those voices in your head of all those successful people who have been through hell and back) and focusing on the task at hand. You can get it down to a point where this feels really good. Just tune out the negative stuff, and slowly but surely, focus on what you are doing, and you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish.
And if you think about it, this is probably the most important skill anyone can have - the ability to not let anything phase you, the ability to not let anything get inbetween you and that which you have either decided to do or that which you must to in order to accomplish or get to a point where you want to go.
Tune out the FUD, and the self-aggrandizing nonsense from all those masochistic successful individuals and watch those A's start rolling in. Science isn't advanced enough to understand you (yet).
Study hard; work hard; accomplish lots - but do it with a calm, positive mind. It's definitely a skill worth learning.
many people feel that in order for a change to happen, or that in order for something to take place, that it has to be difficult (i.e. - no pain no gain). This is what happens when you have a male-dominated society for thousands of years.
There are also many people who feel that in order for something to take place, it does not necessarily have to be difficult, in other words, that you can have gain without pain. This is true, although it won't win you any popularity awards.
The important part is the gain. Action, accomplishment - that's the important thing.
My suggestion would be to focus on the English language - to get really good at English - think of it like a programming language to program reality. If you know good English, all other things are then possible. And English is fun, too, like writing things on Slashdot - it can be relaxing, and if you "get into it", you can write things for hours and hours and hours. Writing for fun is just a wonderful way to relieve stress and discover new ideas. It also keeps you thinking about things even when you are walking down the street, for instance.
The Tao of Physics is another interesting book, althought lots of folks don't like the book. I read the book, and it's highly recommended. I don't think that it will teach you physics, but it will sort of get you up to speed on how to not get lost in all of the "FUD" that some of these people like to put out about life being anything less than something completely amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
searching on the web, apparently the mechanism is to trick the immune system into attacking the drug molecules - having the immune system destroy the moleculues of the "stuff" that gets you high, so you never get high because it never reaches the brain.
I am guessing that th9s "super-virus" that they are talking about might do the same thing - attack the molecules of the chemicals that get you high as if they were harmful bacteria or something.
Interesting. I don't know if I like it. Although there might be some potential good there, somewhere. Wonder how long it takes to wear off...
I am sure that you could convince yourself that it's the right thing to do, but overall, it just sounds like a bad idea.
I am sure that with certain types of logic, such as -- "take this vaccine or go to jail", it would all of a sudden become a very good idea. Then again, another line can also, in certain circumstances, seem to be a good idea.
One should try to not use drugs on one's own first. If it really doesn't work, and you are certain that death is imminent, of course it's a good idea. In other words - "take this vaccine or you will very likely die or spend the rest of your life a hopeless drug addict" is very good logic. If it works, that's wonderful. But if it only removes the effect (i.e. the "relief"), then an existing addict might spend the rest of their life never being able to fulfill the craving? That might cause people to commit suicide or something - if that's what it does.
I just don't see how anyone can predict with complete certainty that a particular child is going to have a drug problem.
These types of things should only be given to people who have serious drug problems as a last resort. If the vaccine needs to be given prior to an individual having developed a drug problem, then there are going to be ethical, legal, moral, and "class" issues about it.
Generally speaking, FreeBSD is good, and Linux is also good. I think that they are both good, if you know how to configure them.
Linux is excellent when it comes to hardware that is not i386. That is one of Linux's greatest strengths. Also NetBSD's, but there are things about Linux and expensive cutting-edge hardware that are undeniably wonderful.
FreeBSD is best on the i386, perhaps the Alpha as well. I have not tried FreeBSD on Alpha, but FreeBSD on i386 is great. So are some Linux distributions on i386.
One thing that I like about FreeBSD is this: now that everyone has broadband, (well, not everyone) - but when it comes to installing an OS on your computer, broadband sure does help.
So I stopped downloading the ISOs and basically all you need for Debian, and FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo as well, I am sure that there are more like this - but I have tried all of those - you download and burn a small install CD-R - something like 50-100 megs or so, and then the installer downloads whatever else you want. That way an entire install with most of what you need to get up and running in terms of software is about 300-600 megs, or so, depending on what you want to install right off the bat.
A situation I ran into with Debian was this - come back later, say like a month later, and try to install an application that has dependencies (in my case it was K3B without having KDE on the machine) - and it doesn't work. Libraries and dependencies have been upgraded and are newer than what you have on your machine the older ones that would be appropriate for your install aren't available anymore - so you need to upgrade the system first. If you had a snapshot (i.e. if you had downloaded 3 or 4 isos and installed from that) you would be OK, you would just be getting slightly older everything by installing from the CDs you downloaded a month ago. But having done the net install, I had to upgrade the entire OS, which is probably not a bad idea, and is pretty easy to do anyway, but still... all I wanted to do was install one program and I have to upgrade the entire OS to be in sync with everything on the debian software archives. Not a big deal, but it kind of makes you think that sometimes it would be nice to have a snapshot.
This is the cool thing about the FreeBSD ports system. The ports system looks in various places for the source code of things - not a central binary archive that you set with Debian, for instance - and if you ever look at source code ftp servers and so on, you can find previous versions for perhaps even years later after newer versions have come out. So with the ports system, you essentially have a snapshot, and even though it may take longer, and the ports system might search many different places and experience timeouts when it tries to find source code for stuff a year after you originally installed it, chances are that it still might work. Certainly, you can upgrade the ports system via cvs anytime, and it's a good idea to do so, as well as upgrade your base system (which is, admittedly, a bit scary) but the nice thing is that you don't have to upgrade the ports every few weeks if you don't want to. So with FreeBSD you get to do a netinstall, save bandwidth and CD-Rs, yet still have what essentially amounts to a snapshot in time of additional software. There are also occasional advantages to building software from source in terms of legal issues, which all results in having more software available than you would when someone else has to take the source and repackage it up for you and redistribute it in binary form.
The other nice thing with FreeBSD is that it has a repository of binaries, which it hits up when you first do your install, to help speed things up. You can recompile everything from source later once you get your system up and running if you really want to. Get it running first.
I suppose you could do many of these things with Gentoo as well, in a similar fashion. One thing that Gentoo still needs is a good selection of binaries - I am sure t
I thought that Linux was supposed to be a pain!
/etc/motd) but you didn't realize it was there. This is uncharted territory, and it's just plain bad engineering.
And I thought that Windows was supposed to be user friendly.
While you may have to configure Linux, and while the configuration details might have a learning curve, they are by no means anything even resembling uncharted territory - what you need to do to configure Linux is actually documented fairly well, if you know where to look.
But this kind of registry editing and the thing with the renaming of the file and running some batch job -- this is uncharted territory. It's not something that you didn't know before, and had to learn. It's not something that was always there (e.g.
Linux is easier, it seems, than this. Perhaps the real answer is that getting Linux "just right" involves some experimentation, and that there is an ever-present learning curve with Linux. Aside from that, it's consistent. It always boils down to some file that you didn't know about or some place where you can set some setting that you had to learn about.
The desciption in this article is just downright scary. I'm sticking with Linux, thanks. Actually, I should say GNU/Linux or other modern Unix-like OS's such as the BSDs - if I am going to be precise about it. There is a learning curve, yes... but once you are over that part of it, which does take a while, it's a very comfortable place to be.
There has been talk about giving greater support to music and arts, at all levels of education, grade school on up. Creativity is important.
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I have this disturbing vision though, sometimes, of what music class might boil down to - the concept of being famous, of being cool, of finding inspiration in pop music. Creativity equating to pushover, student-pleasing teachers that allow their music students to act out their fantasies of fame and popularity in class, in front of other students, in the name of music education and appreciation. A poor substitute for what could be important groundwork for a strong creative arts curriculum.
Ok, maybe that's my personal nightmare, and actually, I hope that I am wrong. But when I see something like this, it reaffirms my dilemna.
Supporting music and the arts in the classroom, at all levels of education, grade school on up, does not necessarily have to equate to "cool", or "popular", or whatever.
I don't think that this is a good thing, handing out all those Ipods, because there are many ways to do things, and everybody learns differently. Quality education, like open source software, is (should be) about customizing the educational environment so that you can learn in the most efficient way possible, which is ultimately different for each student.
I suppose if you are paying out this much money for tuition an Ipod might as well be as irrelevant as a welcoming brochure, so it's probably not really that big of a deal.
It would be better, however, to simply hand out the iPods and not try to conjure up some kind of excuse and to not try and find some productive use for them. That's the kind of stuff that got Martha thrown in jail, if you think about it.
All this really goes to show is how respect for multimedia, creativity, and the arts, has been slipping in our educational systems, because as we can see here in this case, the creative arts are being used as an excuse to give everyone iPods, just like they are used as an excuse by students who wish to entertain their secret fantasies of fame and fortune.
It's (should be) about the creativity, it's (should be) about the expression, the wit, the depth of expression that we can experience when we watch a good movie, or listen to a good piece of music.
A light bulb went off in someone's head, and they figured out how useful this contraption could be in furthering what that individual percieves as "underwater basket weaving" - unimportant, easy to manipulate, "won't pay the mortgage" creative arts. It would be interesting if there were any comparsion studies done between different approaches. Let's compare the purchase of these iPods to the purchase of textbooks, or the selection of teaching staff - and then we will see
We need more respect for the creative arts, from the grade-school level on up.
The only reason anyone would want to take action on a patent in such a manner would be in order to draw attention to themselves (e.g. a patent pool peddling patents). There is nothing MS can gain by doing this, and they aren't going to shut anything or anyone down. It is more than likely to backfire on them.
It's a cold war, and rogue nations would threaten to use the weapons (i.e. file a lawsuit to grab attention) - MS is a superpower, they are not going to push that button.
It just won't happen. MS is too worried about patents itself. They are only meaningful if you don't use them. Once you use them you lose any advantage that you may have had.
They have it in red China. Songs that are sung to praise the leaders and songs that sing about how great everything is.
Someone like W gets elected and then we have all of these right-wing authors and talk-show hosts that all of a sudden become relevant - they weren't relevant before, and won't be relevant if/when someone like Kerry gets elected.
The music industry should try to seperate itself from the government; the reason it should try to do this is because the music industry should remain in a place where it can enable artists to be critical of the government; where it can enable artists to be critical of unjust wars and other things.
When the music or entertainment industry goes to the government to seek help, they are hurting their future ability to remain independent of that government, they are hurting the ability of artists that they support in the future to be critical of the government, and to remain independent of the dark, inaccurate corners of that government's policies.
Any government will make mistakes, and constituent "bases" will take delight in things that need to be changed. Here is one area that artists can provide an alternate opinion, a different view - one can only infer from its actions that the music industry has no intention of trying to support and encourage diverse thought and opinion.
So they will keep churning out pickup truck and cowboy gear advertisements and SUV aftermarket parts advertisements and reality videos of karaoke, with perhaps the occasional college band-member's reality heartbreaking girlfriend-boyfriend relationship reality video mixed in here and there.
I think that a more likely scenario is that no one is really going to want to download anything the mainstream music media has to offer if they keep going at it the way they are going at it.
Popular music and conservative government should not mix, it does not lead to good things. If the music industry wants its fans to take care of it, and respect it, if it wants to attract talented artists who think outside the box, and aren't afraid to voice their political opinions, it should not go running to the government like it is doing.
There is the quote from an AC/DC song - "living on the streets, you gotta practice what you preach" - so that is, if the mainstream music industry wants to support and encourage artists that present an unbiased opinion, perhaps artists that present opinions that aren't as favorable to government and the status quo, they can't go running to the goverment for help like that. It won't work. No one is going to take the maistream music industry seriously.
Maybe all those dowloaders are just bored, and/or have nothing better to download. Destroying their ability to download anything other than music industry stuff via criminalizing competing technical gadgets isn't going to make them any less bored, or give them anything more interesting or more download-friendly (in a legal sense) to download.
FreeBSD (I am using 4.10) has a Gentoo "stage 1" port, actually.
/usr/compat/linux, under which you have all the usual /usr (that would be /usr/compat/linux/usr/, if you know what I mean) and /bin and /lib, and so on...
/usr/compat/linux and then you can "make system" or whatevever. It's not bad.
/usr/compat/linux/usr/portage by chrooting into /usr/compat/linux and emerging sync, and then emerge whatever you want - as long as you are chrooted, it should work (I haven't tried it). So everything you emerge should be done while you are chrooted into /usr/compat/linux - if I understand this correctly -- however, the Gentoo port, the Gentoo FreeBSD port, under /usr/ports/emulators/, would be installed like any other FreeBSD port - and actually, there are many FreeBSD "Linux" ports that can be installed automatically from the FreeBSD ports system, no chrooting or anything required. The chrooting would be if you wanted to leave FreeBSD behind and enter into Linux land - apparently this works, but I haven't tried it. Everything I have needed to install that is a Linux binary has been available as a FreeBSD port.
There is a directory called
so you... "chroot" into
The default is a Red Hat - I have what is essentially a basic Red Hat 9.0 system on my FreeBSD machine, there is also a port for Debian Stable.
So you can do vmware for Linux, or you can do vmware for FreeBSD, just like you can do Mozilla for Linux, or any other app for Linux. I imagine you could install portage under
Another cool thing is that you can apparently upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 and above to Dragonfly BSD, which is something I will probably be doing at some point in the future.
I have this somewhat funky, older computer - it's a somewhat (1.5 Ghz) speedy Athlon, but the thing is it has this somewhat older Seagate 10K RPM SCSI hard drive in it. I kind of pieced this computer together from parts here, and parts there.
So of course, I had to install Gentoo on it. I did. It took a while. I burned out a stick of RAM. I am afraid of Gentoo. But anyway, I got it up and running, but I had to disable tagged queueing on the disk to keep it from freezing up all the time. So here I am, with a functional Gentoo machine, and this 10,000 RPM disk is very, very loud. You can hear it in the next room when it does an updatedb or anything like that. With the ext3 filesystem, I do believe that it was doing what you call "thrashing". Just really loud, scary type of many tiny ball bearings in a coffee can type noise. Well, I had had enough, and Gentoo really creeped me out. I didn't like the idea of a journaling filesystem that fscks every now and then and you never know what the fsck is going to find. The first fsck it did (after some 20+ reboots over the course of a month or two) required a reboot because of some inconsistency it found. Just not cool at all - maybe I am paranoid, but I would rather have the thing fsck right away - and I know you can set it that way, or set it not to fsck at all, but in any case - the real drag was how loud the disk was, and that it appeared to be thrashing when certain things were going on - make installs, file extracts, updatedbs. I didn't like it. It creeped me out.
So I installed FreeBSD 4.10. I love FreeBSD. And you know something, the disk is really, really quiet now. I went back and re-enabled tagged queueing. No problems. Same disk, same controller, different OS. The disk sort of sounds like a welder now (like you are welding something). It's not loud, it doesn't thrash, and the power got cut once, but it fsck'd right away and you know you're good to go immediately, not waiting for the next 28th reboot to find out there is something horribly wrong with your filesystem.
So it's really amazing to me, how much quieter the disk is with FreeBSD. I know it's a loud disk, it's kind of a funky computer. It even has a funky heatsink. But the difference is like night and day.
So in this case, switching from ext3 to ufs solved a problem that I had. The disk I/O is actually a tad slower with ufs, it appears, according to bonnie++, which I did on both OS's... but the disk is so much quieter that I can hardly believe it. I would have never imagined it.
So sometimes, it may not be so much that you know what is wrong, or where the problem is coming from, but it's your ability to do something about it. In my case, I chose ufs, because I didn't want the disk to thrash, even though I was getting just slightly over 1MB/s greater disk I/O with ext3. This is not something you can just do overnight, it required a complete OS reinstall.
Right now, though, it is just a really wonderful computer to use - my last uptime was 10 days, 10 hours, and 10 minutes and 39 seconds. (storm was coming in and I don't have a UPS). Wonderful, stable, smooth-running, and _somewhat_ quiet system.
But seriously, I still haven't figured out what it is about Gentoo that creeps me out. I wonder if Dtrace could help me out with that one.
Dtrace does sound cool though, I think it can be very useful, provided that you can make the changes that you need to make without reinventing the wheel, or refactoring your entire program. Maybe there would be some way that Sun could sell it to people, or port it to other OS's and let people buy binary versions of it for a nominal fee?
The only problem I had that was really unexpected and devastating was when I touched the thermal tape to the CPU core more than once. In other words, thermal tape is only good on the first application. If you move it around, take it on and off, trying to double-check your work, to see if the heatsink is on there properly, you kill the thermal tape. You have once chance with the thermal tape to put that on properly, and if you remove the heatsink after the tape has touched the CPU, it's no good anymore.
Anyway, at the time the Duron 750 was like a $30.00 part, and memory was incredibly cheap and getting cheaper, so a new stick of RAM and a new Duron 750, a Thermaltake vacuum cleaner and some thermal grease, and everything was back to normal.
It's been since upgraded to an XP 1700+, so that's pretty nice. Still works well, solid, reliable, weeks-of-uptime BSD machine.
Careful with that thermal tape!
...and I can see some people take their political viewpoints to the moderation booth
OK - what does this have to do with anything? I'll tell you... it's an interesting story. A friend of mine knows Michael Moore personally, so I have always kind of been very supportive of his efforts with Bowling, and Roger and Me, etc... I was excited when the trailer came out, watched it, etc...
Then Ken Brown with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute came out with the "samizdat" stuff about Linux being stolen from Minix or some nonsense, and I was reading all about that, and I was, of course, stunned by the "FUD", and was reading every article that came out about it.
So there I was, reading an article rebutting Ken Brown and his anti-Linux propoganda, written by a very knowlegable individual, and it was a good article (I don't remember which article it is now or I'd link to it) - it went through the issues point by point, and it was, I thought, a well-written article that "stuck up" for Linux, and open source. But here's the thing, the point, the phrase that changed my life as I know it... the author said that what Ken Brown had done would make individuals like Micheal Moore "blush", or something along those lines. Some other individuals were mentioned, I believe Limbaugh was another one. In other words, Ken Brown has "outdone" Moore, and Moore could "learn" from Brown. It didn't even click, or sink in, for a second or two.
But then I did some searching on the net, and you know what, my friend actually threatened to never speak with me again if I didn't shut up about it. But despite all that, my opinion is that Moore is just a little "screwy". My opinion, mind you. Not a fact, not other people's opinion.
Freedom of speech - OK, freedom of speech is a good thing - let's "bring" freedom of speech "to the world". But bringing "democracy" to the world, that's got to be a big sin, right? How could those war-mongers even suggest that other countries want democracy, right? But showing the film in Syria, in Lebanon, right on, babe. Those countries "need" freedom of speech. They "need" our American values and Mr. Moore is going to bring it to them! Rock on.
OK - it's all fun and powerful UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU. Like it did with Linux and Ken Brown, or SCO. When SCO happens to YOU, when AdTI happens to YOU, when Michael Moore happens to YOU - you will feel differently about it. Of course, it is freedom of speech, after all, which is EXACTLY what SCO is... freedom of speech, and why Germany could tell them to put a sock in it and the US can't - freedom of speech. And freedom of speech means that you may hear things that you don't like - but that's OK - my freedom of speech says that Moore has a deep-seated hatred towards America, and a lack of respect for Americans as human beings. Again, my opinion, my freedom of speech. Not facts, etc.. There is a difference between "touching up" a picture in Photoshop to make it look better and fake celebrity porn. There is a line, where editing, chopping and piecing things together becomes something else (like fake celebrity porn). But hey... freedom of speech, right? No problem with that.
I really hate to be unpopular, especially since my friend knows Moore personally, but I have some questions that I wouldn't mind asking the gentleman. Granted, much of what is presented in Farenheit IS factually acurrate, not to mention that there ARE many issues with the Bush administration. It's just that there is a deeper sense of integrity and affect that I am looking for, that I am not finding. It's not balanced, and it's anti-American. Hatred is a bad thing, especially if you hate your own country. That's different from being angry at the current administration's policies and actions. Two different things. If you hate America, and you are an American, they you hate yourself. None of us really had any choice in where we were born, so I think we need to look at citizenship and patriotism in a completely different way than we are tending to.
I guess that the thing that bugs me, when it boils down to it, and take this how you will, is that Moore i
I think that it's perfectly reasonable to collect flac versions of stuff. A 20 Gig hard drive, for instance will give you approximately 75 hours of music, if you use flac. Make a copy of the flac files to a DVD-R, and import them as necessary into your ipod. It's not that bad.
With 128, you are almost literally carrying what would have been an individual's entire record collection around with you on a small device, so yes, that is a huge jump in terms of how much stuff you are carrying around with you - so with flac, you can carry 40-50 "CDs" with you (on a 20 gig drive, that is) - that's a lot, isn't it? It's better than almost any other way of hauling 50 compact disks with you in some kind of zippered thing, isn't it?
I think flac is way more realistic (if you have broadband, that is). If you don't have broadband, forget it. It should, at least, be an option, I think.
There is a difference in sound quality, no doubt about it. And with flac, for instance, you are chopping the size of the files in half, so with lots of "legacy" stuff - in other words.. stuff that is originally from vinyl, where a "CD" may only be 40-45 mins, you can usually fit three CD's in flac format onto a 700mb data CD-R.
Collecting low bit-rate stuff is kind of a last resort, for instance, if there were no other way to get a particular album, and you really wanted that album, settling for a 128 version would be OK most of the time. But if the CD is available for purchase, and you are paying $10 for a 128 bitrate version, the extra few bucks for the CD are more or less worth it.
I think flac is the way to go.
The first logical step is to eliminate the zombies. There has got to be some way to do this, but here is what it requires: a more secure OS. So, it's probably not going to happen.
The second logical step is to trace back where the spam is originating from and at least try to, in some way, utilizing due process, hold people accountable for it. Of course there is no point in doing this until we have more secure OS's that won't act like zombies.
So, first, eliminate the zombies, then, once that is done (probably never), hold people accountable, or notify them, or send out warning that they will get blackholed or something - because if you get rid of the zombies, then anyone sending spam will be easier to track down, even if it is a webhost or something like that.
The portability issue comes up a lot of times when it comes to using "undocumented", or "implementation specific" features of programming languages.
If you stick to the programming languages as they are defined in various official industry standards (e.g. ISO) - then you may lose some functionality, undocumented functionality, functionality that may only work for one particular platform. More than likely, you are going to have to play around with it to see what it actually does when you write code this way - it will do one thing on Windows, another thing on Macs, and so forth. That's why you shouldn't use it.
Portability involves two things - 1) writing good code (this requires that you know how to write good code) and 2) sticking to the standard and not using undocumented features. Of course, these are both related, because if you stick to the standard and only use documented features, then you have taken a large step towards writing good code.
"portability is for canoes" = "laziness, poor programming habits, poor programming skills, and hack jobs to meet MY deadlines, are perfectly acceptable. Actually, anything that makes me look like a good manager is perfectly acceptable! ".
This kind of stuff simply won't work very well in a competitive marketplace.
We really need to define "great software", and when you think about it, that's difficult to do, especially since software is a moving target.
"Shipping" does not involve cvs access, and probably doesn't involve source code access either.
"On time" doesn't really make sense, unless, of course you have been making promises, or have been given deadlines.
1. Study the successes that you see, study those individuals or organizations that have accomplished things similar to which you wish to accomplish, and then apply what you have learned. It's a very good key to success. If were were to learn something from this, we would need to look further than just one company, further than just one manager.
2. Software is a moving target. Some software moves faster than others, and the whole idea of a "snapshot" goes against the grain of a moving target (it's just easier to deal with sometimes.) Software, really, should be an on-going development process, and while it's possible that you might have to slow down the speed of the "moving target" in order to take a snapshot, or make a "release", taking snapshots and releases shouldn't occur to the detriment of the ongoing development process in general, and the current state of development should be somewhat ahead of the snapshot or release. Great software is more like a living organism, less like an inanimate object. The release, or the snapshot, or the "shipping", has traditionally been the main focus, but what really counts, I think, is that the development process be ongoing, and progressing at a sufficiently consistent and rapid rate. Shipping something is just something that happens as part of the development process, a side effect, if you will; the development process is the main focus, the main goal.
I can understand where the individual is coming from, but this is really more like a how-to on how to keep your job as a manager in an organization such as Microsoft - these rules may not work universally in all business settings, in all software development settings, and may, in fact, be detrimental.
What is really needed is more input - more input from employees, from managers, from the managers' managers - from a diverse selection of software development organizations across the globe - then there needs to be an agreement on what is "great software" - obviously, we are currently moving out of a phase where the relatively new world of software and computers has been dominated by one software vendor - it's hard to define "great software" if you don't have a competitive and free marketplace. It's like trying to define "great leader" in a dictatorship. It just doesn't work.
There's no proof - there is insufficient evidence that this will actually work today, and tomorrow, as the world moves towards a more competitive marketplace in the software industry. I certainly doubt that this is going to be very good for turnover rates, and most importantly, will this type of development methodology be successful in ATTRACTING and RETAINING the MOST talented software designers that are out there? I think the answer to that question is obvious.
I probably agree with most of what he says there, except for that
1) good code isn't propoganda
2) destroying Microsoft shouldn't be a goal
3) beggars can't be choosers - (I won't beg people to use Linux)
not to mention...
Using patents as anything other than a form of insurance or a form of fake currency is entirely unproductive and will only serve to reduce their value as a fake currency and as a modern-day form of insurance. Unless, of course, people would choose to use them for what they are meant to be used for...
The DMCA is going to be rewritten
Someone is going to take what this Halloween document says and twist it and try to prove that Linux is out to destroy proprietary software and your paycheck, which will generate more arguments back and forth.
Just because Red Hat might be right doesn't mean that they are the best choice in software for your organization.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
Microsoft is a company. What is a company but a collection of individuals. The problem is not Microsoft, the problem is individuals who work, used to work, know people who work, etc... at Microsoft. The same thing can be said for government. It's not Microsoft + the government out to destroy Linux, it's individuals + individuals being selfish, greedy and stupid.
The first thing that can be done is to show respect for Microsoft. Sure, Linux costs more, but IT'S BETTER. (which is true). Linux is more expensive because it's better. (it's actually less expensive). Now all the rich folks will want Linux because it's the "Cadillac" of operating systems. Microsoft gets Chevrolet status by their own request.
I recently though of an analogy after reading Stephen Hawking's book - it's about entropy, or the direction of time. Glasses fall off of tables and shatter, they don't pick themselves up from pieces on the floor and magically un-break themselves and fall "up" back on the table in one piece.
But God, or in this case, let's compare God to the public - to the individual who is observing what is going on, and making a decision, a judgement, as to which software solution is the best to buy.
Can God, or the observer, in this case, press "rewind", and have the glass re-assemble itself? If this is true, does it really matter who threw the first punch? For all anyone cares, they are just "fighting". It doesn't matter who started it.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
It's not why it's being done. Apparently some individuals feel that by generating this type of to-do, that some greater purpose is being served. This has everything to do with greedy, misguided individuals within large (or not so large) organizations who have somehow decided that they can obtain great wealth by looking in dark corners of closets or attics, etc. That's what I think.
The whole thing is being "reverse-engineered". The "desired outcome" is a lawsuit, so whatever it takes to produce one is what takes place. Normally, the lawsuit is the means by which another desired outcome is produced. In this case, the "desired outcome" is/are the lawsuit(s), because this is about individuals within organizations obtaining promotions or "finding valuables in attics", or something like that.
This is what happens sometimes within large (or perhaps, sometimes, not so large) organizations - a few individuals wielding great power, looking to improve their status in the world, stab and fumble and grope in the dark, searching for their own private monetary nirvana, unable to settle for a salary and job security that "ain't broke".
This is not good for Microsoft the company; it's not good for Microsoft the company's reputation; perhaps sometime soon someone representing Microsoft the company will step forward and proclaim this whole thing an unhelpful distraction, which is exactly what it is.
I think every one of us has worked with an individual or two who had their own selfish interests placed ahead of their coworkers and the company itself. How much more tempting might it be, working amongst (or for) one of the wealthiest individuals in the US, if not the world? Let's face it... Microsoft is a legend, and Microsoft will always be a legend. Microsoft can have a bright future, Microsoft should have a bright future. It's as plain and simple as that. What is really needed here is another Lee Iacocca, another Jack Welch, etc... people like this are out there, and they do exist. But money talks, and being around it changes you - it takes a very, very strong individual to be able to turn down the prospect of an early retirement to do the right thing. What, with the patents and all, who wouldn't want to just go to some tropical island and never have to worry about this nonsense again? Perhaps one day when someone who truly has a passion for quality products, whether they be hardware or software, when someone who has true leadership abilities, and can inspire people to produce tip-top products - I believe there will be such a day, and I believe there will be such a person, but a little patience will be required - but when this day comes, I think that we should all try to get out there and welcome Microsoft back into the real world. It would be a good thing, sort of like a long-lost friend or something. The changes that will be necessary will happen, and the negativity and FUD will stop, it's just going to take the right person to bring this about.
Anything prior to 1991 is not Linux, actually.
I guess it really depends on what you call a Unix timeline, and what you call SCO intellectual property. Of course it wasn't their intellectual property at the time, but it is now since they changed the contracts on everyone. IBM didn't think that they could change the contracts, and see what happened.
They sued Daimler Chrysler for not giving them the serial numbers of processors that used to run UNICOS 1.0 or something similar (UNICOS 1.0 apparently always shipped with source)- for Cray supercomputers that vary in processing power from approximately 0.25 gigaflops to 1 gigaflop. No one keeps museum pieces that old around, there is no point in doing so, especially when the point of having those computers in the first place was for their supercomputing abilities.
It's not a Unix timeline if they use it like that; they are basically saying that "Linux" has its "roots" in stuff prior to 1991, but that "SCO Linux", whatever that is supposed to mean, is anything from 1991 forward.
The whole point is this: whatever it is that SCO are doing, they are doing things that will more than likely fail. Expecting an organization to keep records of a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the mid-eighties that has approximately 1/60th the floating-point processing power of a single-processor G5 at 2.0 Ghz and the equivalent of 64 megs of ram is a little bit on the funny side, I seriously doubt that any organization would have the floor space to keep a computer like that around just for the sake of licensing purposes. How many of us wrote legal documents to Microsoft cancelling our EULAs when we stopped using Windows 3.0, or say, for instance, how many universities wrote documents to Sun Microsystems every time they retired an IPX or a Sparcstation 1+ or perhaps something even older than that? It's just so you can say "We are suing this prominent company for something that, when you look more closely at it, is never going to fly, but we realize that most people won't look at it that closely or understand it that thoroughly, so it will, in the end, have the desired effect.
Anything prior to approximately 1991 is not Linux, so again, it's not relevant.
It does explain what \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}, is though, - \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\} would be Linux (post-1991).
Anything prior to that is not Linux, so it's not \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}.
SCO is basically saying that because they distributed Linux at some point under the GPL, and because the GPL is not valid in their opinion, that because they contributed to it, and because they hold some sort of UNIX rights, that they own Linux. That's really what they are saying, it has nothing to do with Minix, that's just a coincidence.
Of course, they won't get away with it. They know that, the lawyers know that, we know that. The real question is WHY are they doing it? That's the question. The answer to that question is known by those who need to know.
Some certifications are a way to learn how to use a particular company's hardware or software; there is usefulness in that.
Are you really learning anything, that is the question.
I have to disagree with the author; my personality and his certainly wouldn't match up and I would have a hard time working with an individual like that.
It's not so much that "certifications" are useless, as a whole, it's that some certifications are next to useless, or are just incredibly easy to get. And on top of that, the "goal" gets twisted, and the idea becomes "passing the exam", instead of looking deeper into actually learning the material that the exam is supposed to test you on. "Cracking" the test, so to speak is what is creating this problem.
Then again, there is no universal law that states that if you are a highly talented HR person that you will also be a highly talented writer of articles, is there? Any talented, careful, professional HR person with an attention to detail can weed out those individuals who have used the certification as leverage to try to obtain a position that they are not qualified for.
If you know your stuff, the certification is not necessarily a hoop to jump through, it's more like a bookshelf on which to put your books, or something like that. If you have to study for it, you should study for it, and you should learn what you need to know. If you really know what you need to know to pass the certification, and the certification is a difficult and professionaly prepared certification, then it should more or less be somewhat of a piece of cake to take the exam.
Any half-way competent HR person can weed their way through these types of things and make sufficiently accurate decisions regarding personnel. Whether or not that HR person can write a good article, or whether an individual who can write a good article is also a qualified HR person is implementation-specific.
I installed a Linux OS on a new computer that I put together, and I was excited that SGI's XFS was available on Linux. I had been using UFS with Softupdates on a FreeBSD machine, and having gone through various power outages and a minor tornado-like event with no problems, I wanted to have some sort of similar thing on the new Linux machine, and I wasn't necessarily convinced that ext2 was up to the task (compared to UFS with Softupdates).
But when I heard that xfs was available on Linux, I jumped at the chance, and am still using that machine today. I like XFS, but you have to be careful, because you will tend to lose data when the power cuts out. Whatever files you were last working on, whatever apps were open, that is what is most vulnerable. You might very well end up with an empty file, and that's not a whole lot of fun. I guess that I was just misinformed, or was reading stuff that had misinformed me about the data loss situation. Perhaps ext3 would have been better, but I really wanted to be "cool", as well, so I had to do xfs, of course.
So I later realized that the purpose of xfs (and journaling filesystems in general) was not so much to protect from filesystem corruption and data loss, but to be able to get your filesystem back up and running easier without having to do extensive fsck procedures when you fire your machine back up. So that's a lesson learned - I still like xfs, and I love the speed with which it performs, even if there are risks when things aren't backed up. For now, I will continue using it, but it's probably not EXACTLY what I was looking for as a replacement for ufs with softupdates.
But anyway, back to RAID. There are advantages to RAID - if you have a mirrored hard drive, you don't need to go hunt down your backup, you just switch over to the other drive. You don't constantly need to take backups (every 5 minutes, I mean) to have that mirrored drive be current. You can also get the speed.
What I am wondering is this: Isn't using RAID as a way to mitigate simple hard drive failure in a residential setting something that the concept of RAID perhaps wasn't exactly designed for? Journaling filesystems, for instance - the idea is to recover QUICKLY, not just recover. It seems to me that RAID is, similarly, designed so that you can recover QUICKLY - from a hard drive failure, not just recover, and that's just a hard drive failure - there could be other failures as well, right?
So while RAID is better than nothing to help you recover from a failure of a hard drive specifically, a better insurance policy would be to have a tape drive of some sort and to use that to do backups and incremental backups. It would seem to me that striping might be a hell of a lot more fun anyway.
So I think that until we really look at the purposes that RAID can effectively be used for in a bulletproof sense, we might not understand why RAID might be an imperfect solution to the problem of surving a simple hard drive failure in a residential setting, where uptime is not as critical as it might be in a more non-residential type facility.
I think two computers is a good idea. Keep one unplugged (from everything) when you are not using it, and keep your personal files synced up as best you can (or backed up with CD-Rs, DVD-Rs). Then you can have fun with striped RAID setups if you want and not worry. In the long run, setting yourself up so that you can do the risky stuff is probably not only going to give you the confidence to have fun, but might also serve as a safety net that you didn't even know you had if that ever becomes necessary.
I will give you that much, I understand. Here is the thing - some folks will sell other folks access to these signals for a fee. For a much smaller fee, actually, than DirectTV charges to do it legitimately. So at that point, when you have groups or individuals who are setting up hardware that will allow access to the premium channels, and selling it for a profit for themselves, and these groups and individuals have nothing to do with DirectTV, then you might have a problem.
It's like people selling cable boxes for cheap, so that they can make a profit, giving other folks access to premium cable channels that the cable co. would charge them a lot more for.
So in that sense, the "pirates", in these types of situations, they have no overhead, and they are making money off of those signals. On the other hand, if they are already radiating through your brain, that's a different situation altogether.
I don't know where people get this concept that the only reason to go to college is to prove to an employer that you are willing to do things that are meaningless and pointless - I have heard this before, usually coming from people who aren't all that particularly successful or satisfied in life.
It's simply not true - perhaps that's the difference between an Ivy league education an one gotten at the local community college.
There are so many things to learn in college, and college does, in fact, have a purpose, although feeling like you need to go to one just so that you don't have to work a horrible job sort of tends to obscure that purpose. I suppose there are many people that graduate with a BS without even having fully grown up yet, still in the daze of youth, so in that case, I suppose you are just lucky.
My point is that we don't respect college enough in our society. We tend to do that with lots of things. Our leaders do the same things with the White House and Congress. A car is no longer a way to get around, it's a fashion statement. A lawsuit is no longer a way to redress injustice, it's a means to force someone to pay up (RIAA).
Ok, lawsuits aren't as important as education, but that's the point - college is so much more than just a way to not be poor; it is so much more than a way to get a job. If you miss that, then you are missing the whole point of what college is all about.
I believe that education, when tapped into properly, can make a huge difference in an individual's life, and by extension, that individual can take what he or she has learned and help change other people's lives. It has nothing to do with money, it has to do with freeing your mind. Free your mind, and your torso will follow. It's true.
So the important thing is to really "get in to" what college is all about, and to not use it as a weapon against other people who are not so fortunate as yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working a menial job; and perhaps if you think there is, maybe one day you will be the one working it. If your self respect comes from the job you hold, then you have no self respect. If you live your life in fear, you haven't obviously tapped into the power of education, and everything education can do for you.
It's FUD - basic, simple, straighforward FUD. I would never suggest to anyone that they go to college simply for the purpose of getting a better job, or to prove to their employer that they can do things that they don't like. It's not BS, actually - it's just crappy teachers and bored students, if it's anything.
I would say that English, actually, English is probably simultaneously one of the most dreaded required courses (freshman comp) and one of the most important pathways to success. If you have good English skills, you are on your way to wherever you want to go. It's really unfortunate, because "english" gets a "bad rap", and it gets totally misunderstood. So that's the biggest challenge, I think, these days - to really get into and appreciate English, the study of language. I think the peer pressure, the college experience tends to do a disservice to the respect of English, and the improvements you can bring to your life by being able to put down your thoughts. I cannot stress this enough.
To say that the primary purpose of college is to prove to your employer that you can sit through a bunch of BS is completely off the mark, because 1) it's not BS and 2) it won't get you a very good job, and 3) if you think it's BS that's because you weren't paying attention.
I think this type of attitude is one of the biggest problems our society faces these days - our computer software crashes 5 times a day but we use it anyway, and pay thousands of dollars to do so - college is all BS, but we go anyway, and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debts to do so.
See, my dear friend, THIS is the difference - THIS is the difference between your ilk and the Ivy League, my dear, dear friend. THIS is what you DON'T get when you hire an Ivy League graduate.
Put that in your book and read it.
You can't drive an F1 car on the street. Or perhaps a four-leaf clover. Or something like that.
The important part, actually, is realizing, or finding ways to make things that are unpleasant tolerable - to approach things objectively - like criticism, for instance, like politics, demonstrations, being chewed out by someone who doesn't like you and perhaps feels threatened by you.
It's the ability to tune out those unpleasant "vibes", if you will - you could call it adapting, perhaps - tune them out and regather yourself.
See the thing is, some people are capable, at least in their own words, of doing something that they really hate. I say that you don't have to hate it; you just have to learn how to tune out the negative emotions and the unhealthy feelings. As a matter of fact, if you hate it, such as many of these apparently successful individuals point out, something inside of you won't even allow you to continue; your subconcious will be at war with your rational mind and you will never quite understand the complex failures that you will experience.
To be perfectly honest, I doubt that any individual that talks about "hell" and "stuff you have to do" hasn't had a boyfriend or girlfriend or some other "goal" or "dream" that has helped them "get through" this crap.
Let's face it - there are so many people whom science isn't capable of understanding! And you may not be one of them, but sometimes this stuff is visible, but we just don't understand it.
The talent, the gift, the solution, the answer is this - learn how to tune out anything that doesn't feel or is known as not being good - I mean things like laziness, depression, FUD, inappropriate criticism, and learn how to enjoy just sitting at a desk doing a repetitive task. Some very successful individuals may feel that you may get further in life by running electric shocks through your body, or perhaps hitting yourself over the head with a sledgehammer while sitting at a desk doing repetitive tasks, but nothing could be futher from the truth. The key is learning how to tune out the emotions and fears (and those voices in your head of all those successful people who have been through hell and back) and focusing on the task at hand. You can get it down to a point where this feels really good. Just tune out the negative stuff, and slowly but surely, focus on what you are doing, and you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish.
And if you think about it, this is probably the most important skill anyone can have - the ability to not let anything phase you, the ability to not let anything get inbetween you and that which you have either decided to do or that which you must to in order to accomplish or get to a point where you want to go.
Tune out the FUD, and the self-aggrandizing nonsense from all those masochistic successful individuals and watch those A's start rolling in. Science isn't advanced enough to understand you (yet).
Study hard; work hard; accomplish lots - but do it with a calm, positive mind. It's definitely a skill worth learning.
many people feel that in order for a change to happen, or that in order for something to take place, that it has to be difficult (i.e. - no pain no gain). This is what happens when you have a male-dominated society for thousands of years.
There are also many people who feel that in order for something to take place, it does not necessarily have to be difficult, in other words, that you can have gain without pain. This is true, although it won't win you any popularity awards.
The important part is the gain. Action, accomplishment - that's the important thing.
My suggestion would be to focus on the English language - to get really good at English - think of it like a programming language to program reality. If you know good English, all other things are then possible. And English is fun, too, like writing things on Slashdot - it can be relaxing, and if you "get into it", you can write things for hours and hours and hours. Writing for fun is just a wonderful way to relieve stress and discover new ideas. It also keeps you thinking about things even when you are walking down the street, for instance.
The Tao of Physics is another interesting book, althought lots of folks don't like the book. I read the book, and it's highly recommended. I don't think that it will teach you physics, but it will sort of get you up to speed on how to not get lost in all of the "FUD" that some of these people like to put out about life being anything less than something completely amazing.